I once wished
that we first met as friends, rather than
lovers,
that I knew your tongue

rolling against your teeth to
speak something honest before I felt it curling
around my skin.

Ever since,
I have tried to stay separate – I wanted

to paint portraits of the
earth, of luminaries and geodes,
but every picture looks like my body after ***
with you,
little crystals of you

cornering the emptiest parts of me.
I part as a flower blooms,
two years

and I realize I must believe in falling stars

now.

From air I have crept
in spheres
through caves
underground

making an entrance
to the roots
Over time, I am hardened
in the cold Om thrill
up freezing oar,
toads forest
Ice thin
growing over a jewelry box
of mineral instincts
slowly
foraging
for the silica
as it enters me, a cool bath of fingers,
forming thousands of years out of me

In another universe , different from ours.
The Polar bears walk among crystals and geodes,
The aurora borealis at their feet.
The sky goes white at night,
Lit by a copper moon.
By copper and coal colored stars.
The clouds at sunset are the colors of poems,
the rain is always cool,
and the air the temperature of warm kisses,
In another universe the polar bears walk among crystals and geodes,
In another universe everything is okay.

From beach to beach to beach, glimmering shimmers of sand laden waves lap lazily at your feet. The seaweed masquerade of the crab clumsily dancing amongst the foam is paradoxically poignant but apt.
Sighs of relief as the soothing sensation of the sea on hot blistered feet capture the essence of the moment. The simple pleasures of the beach; sand ridden toes and remarkably veined geodes; the golden grains and barnacle encrusted rocks provide a unique treasure indeed.
And then comes the gentle pitter-patter of a sunshower- putting a literal damper on things- but uniquely completing the picturesque scene.

stellar direction in undulating terrain
punctuated by meteoric columns of infinite light
imparting a clutching embrace to the face of now

lunar reflections form a fluid nocturnal path
to an osculated gateway of fertile encompassment
culminating in breathless pillows of untabled silence

stars without fault grace the expressive heavens
while muted words gaze out through rooftop eyes
cascading over living stone in waterfalls of emotional geodes

Crawl crawl
Burning through
Obsessions
Rotten stew
Crawl crawl
Through the pain
Remission
Is a joke
And life was a game
But is a remainder
of screwups and screwdowns

Crawl Crawl
Burning through
Possessions
Deadbeat crew
Crawl crawl
Forgotten stains
Permission
Is always denied
And rebuttals dumped
In trash cans full
of screwups and screwdowns

Drilling a hole
Finding geodes where a core was
Cold and dark and empty
Drilling a hole
Finding loneliness inside
It is who you are

Extinguished supernovae
Could have contained
And still the darkness would have stayed
Crawl crawl
burning through
your house of cards
melting all definitions
You're a screwup
Still alive

you don’t hurt someone
you wish to keep in your life
you treat them with care
like a precious gem
because you know
their true worth

s.s

We were twin-tailed stars,
bursting forth from the night.
Radiating our warmth,
revelling in delight.

We were gemstones- Geodes;
raw, intwined.
Silver faceted rings,
wrapped tightly in twine.

But as all atoms decay,
light dulls and fades.
Pulls that were closer now drift away,
Oh how I wish.

I wish you would stay.

Redemption.
In a way, the geode is a symbol of redemption.
On the outside, it looks as if it has nothing.
It looks as if it will never contain anything worth smiling over.
However, if one were to break the stone.
If one were to shatter it.
Force it apart.
One would find the shiny array of crystals within.
And in this way, we are all simple geodes.
Holding small complicated things inside.
But it's good.
It's good to be complicated.
For one day, someone will see you in all your complex and confusing contradictory glory.
And they will think that in this sense,
in this one instance.
That you are the most beautiful thing they will ever witness.

You can be cloak
or you can be dagger.
You cannot be both;
the actor and the action. The hand, holding the hand? One foot washes the other?
The hand washing the water.
This is what we're headed for.

You want the careful parts
careless. And you want parents to be
their only child. And raise them.
You want madness because you can't
think of an answer, but it's fine because
you have all the time in the world.
Where are you hiding it all?

You say time is a clock
because you're a **** for metaphors
But a clock is just a counter.
Go count the cars that go by outside
and then tell me how many are yours.
Go count the pretty girls in the back of magazines.
Then tell  me what's it's like to not be alone.

There are no rules on this stuff
written inside of stones, like geodes
and hieroglyphs in unsealed tombs.
These are not traditions, handed down so gently
like hairlines,  These are not heirlooms wrapped in fine wax and tissue.
You will not find this in direct-order mailers. There is no slot in the card catalog,
There are no old wives, no urban legends or gossip.
It's not a secret.  It's not a even a thought. It's simple.

You can be the instinct
or you go de-evolve.  
Back to the single cell
back into the primordial, lay around the house
spend all day playing with yourself
Stimulus! Response!
That old hole in the bucket song;
Did you look inside? Did you see change,
or feel it ***?
The world doesn't stay a world because you think
it might collapse.  And life isn't worth living because it's
hard.    

You can be fight
or you can be flight
or you can be
a rabbit hole in the hat.

Aspire to inspire
And inspired you will be
By the beauty and accident of your pure existence.
Simple elegance contained with ease.
Beautiful nature child;
The Mountains adore you
(As you adore them).
Geodes grow up to your touch
Ferns unroll their fronds
Trees lean branches down to earth
All to be closer
As you walk by.

People are drawn to you
Pulled towards your smile,
Your sense of amazement and wonder
Brightens dull and concrete lives.
You are the brightest star
On a cold and foggy night.
Even without the moon’s glow
I think I should be able to find my way
As long as I could follow
Your happy glimmer.

He is the morning and I have turned into a walking cliché machine.
The sun could sap the day out of my skin and I wouldn’t feel it,
wouldn’t mind if I did.
I want to crack him open and curl up in his chest cavity,
exploring the dark corners with my headlamp and uncovering hidden majesties in geodes, making road maps.
~
Sometimes, I look at their hands,
moving in time to the beat or
engaging in some twisted alchemy,
making circles out of straight lines, or
coaxing the music out of guitar strings, or
painting the unknown like clockwork in due time,
and I wonder what they could do to me in bed.
~
And I still let him touch me when I'm drunk and he's drunk or when I'm sober and he's drunk-he doesn't want to touch me when he's not drinking-because he's like a cigarette and I've made a habit of inhaling deeply, to remind me that he’s cancer in my bones and I’m getting too old for this.
He treats me like the used tissues I crumple in my purse and pull out when my nose gets runny, there when he needs me, stroking my rib cage and covering me in a viscous slime.
He feels like a stubbed toe or a paper cut and mostly I'm a mouth to *** into.
His hands find the parts of my body that people have always told me to keep secret, but it's been a while since I started sending them out on postcards to strangers.
He can grab me with his eyes like a hand grabs the nape of a kittens neck, and I falter.
~
How can I unlove someone I used to love so much?
Mother may I-help me-stop loving all of them at once.

i spent the back half of freshman year as a ghost, drifting through these halls without ever touching anything, haunting my own bones with nothing more under my skin than an echo, watery lungs and glassy eyes that couldn’t see past my own transparency. floating. i don’t like to talk about it.

i spent the start of sophomore year as a zombie, revived but not quite alive again, less like glass and more like porcelain, trailing my hands along the murals and trying to feel again. i existed, but i was still searching for existence. in january i found pieces of myself in a meteor, and in amethyst geodes and lunar eclipses i found that i was less undead and more E.T.
either way i didn’t feel quite human, like i was off by two shades, so i doodled UFOs into the corners of all my notes and wrote poems about people who smiled like stars in the halls, whose laughs made me feel like i was finally home.

i’ve spent all of junior year driving. nothing feels okay in the same way that leaving does. highways sing lullabyes with road signs, other late-night cruisers sending Morse code messages to the helicopters overhead. i don’t have to think.
i’ve spent all of junior year side-stepping every single pestering question about what i’m doing with the next ten years of my life, signing away my soul to banks for student loans, all for a degree that statistically i won’t even need down the road for anything past sharpening my job resumes, like “hey, look, i’ve got all this debt in the pursuit of a higher education, please hire me.”

i’ve spent my junior year catching up on breathing.
i’ve spent my junior year catching up on sleeping.
i spent the first two years of high school half-dead and fully awake, chugging along like a train destined for nowhere, nothing.

i want to spend my senior year moving.
i want to spend my senior year running.
i want to spend my senior year finding life through expelling the ghosts in my bones and burning the skeletons that always left dust on my conscious whenever i reached past them to get t-shirts out of my closet.
i want to spend my senior year shouting.
i want to spend my senior year knowing that i am already everything i ever will be combined with everything i already was.
i want to spend my senior year forming galaxies with my fingertips.
i want to end my high school career knowing that there is a universe of possibilities inside of me.

i spent freshman year as a ghost, but ghosts are best used as metaphors for memories,
and something i’m best at is forgetting.
there are days where i still feel like a zombie, but who doesn’t feel like that at least every single monday morning?

Handshake claw grip, crustaceans with an overstatement,

Never distressed with a sober sense spent on aimless wastage,

Never become too complacent,

Never butter devil's sodden words on scriptures burned through the ages,

Certain pages curtain stages grace to shattered shambles curdled shameless.

Shiny geodes the traditions on the backhand,

Sages matching matter sets a salamandrine babble balance act,

Skin tight ever-bond clasped reattachment,

Radical bags sag at the mystery of a mattress ,

Routine carry forth enabling of double standards,

Tailored youth to a callous canvassed pander *******,

Cat scratch moral compass to the badlands,

The pinnacle of rabid actions in the aftermath,

After that,

A rabbit or a lab rat,

Maze running side effects from the last batch,

No lessons learned just oblivious to brass tax,

Malleable malice in the marrow of the crab man,

Can't stand a phalanx divided by the last laugh,

******* sinner Peter chapters in the chapel of a hashtag,

Shadows in the chiaroscuro flit mongers little gas lamps,

Calypso rhythm stages a symphony of backstabs,

Coup d'etat passive damage scatters gravel slat in sandbags,

No matter shiny medal coiled vertebrae permeate the flashbacks,

Never with a sordid memory retraced to get a plaque stamped.

Sure he always walks around
with his head hanging down,
but I'll be ****** if
he doesn't find the best stones.

From be young the
Moon
There is a word made of geodes and crystals
And above the the sharp
Crystals float
Alien jelly fish
Maybe I am dreaming.

I found the strange ones, the quirky, the broken. I never thought of myself as any of those things, but maybe I found them because some small part of me knew even then that I was broken, too.  

I still think about her. In the strangest moments, my favorite memories pop into my head. Certain smells, certain emotions, certain songs, they all put me right back there. In the ignorant bliss of my youth. Racing across the movie theater parking lot in the pouring rain, because Mom always said that rainy days were the best for movies. Walking down the marble halls of the Science Museum, looking at geodes in the black-lit display cases. Watching the pendulum swing and learning about gravity, that force that makes the world turn and aligns the planets. The very same that couldn't keep her mind here on earth with the rest of us. The same that keeps this ******* sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach. Her voice reading me to sleep, the smell of Estee Lauder perfume wrapping around my small body every time I got sad or frustrated. Her hand rubbing my back when the monsters crept their way down the hall or out of my closet and I couldn't sleep. Placing a cool rag on the back of my neck when I was sick. But it's that smell of rain that gets me every time. We're right back there running through the parking lot. Or maybe we're sitting in the living room watching the storm pass, feeling it shake the house. It was my favorite smell until recently. It smells like grey and like your soul's lifting right out of your body and up into the dewy air and it is total peace. Rain is the smell that makes the world okay. The water droplets racing along the windows of the car.  

Mental Illness doesn't come crashing over you like guilt does, in those cold, salty tear-drenched waves. It's slow. Like if someone were to take an eye dropper and add ink to blood. It's dark the way blood is so you don't even realize it's there at first. By the time it catches up to you, by the time it's noticeable, your whole ******* system has been infiltrated with inky blood, choking out the oxygen or the happiness or whatever is in there that makes you who you are.

claim my starry soul
until it fades away.
wear my heart in strings
until i snap and break.
fly away with wings i gave
fly into the cliffside
and into the cliffside cave.
break apart my geodes
i hold beauty inside,
fill me with your all
and i'll give you
my most contented
sigh.

You are a curious sunflower
Your attention and awe is not only to the Sun
But also the flowers and the bees around you
The soil that gave you footings
The rain that showers your thirst

You were a small, secluded flower
Under the cover of others in Kentucky
Now your roots cover Spain, Alabama and Maine
You are afraid of foreign territories and uncharted plans
But the Sun remains the same wherever you go

Now you are growing to be a flower with layers of colors
Bright as the French marigolds and versatile as the cedar trees
Your beauty stands out among
The Zantedeschia, the canas, the tulips and others not yet discovered

Your hair is a waterfall
Blown by the wind creating a rainbow
Your eyes are pearl blue geodes found near volcanoes
With a light touch of Blue Torenia
Your gaze is like fireflies lighting the forest
Your smile is a fire bringing ease to wonderers and friends
In the cold Maine winter

Photos only capture spark, pedal, drop of you  
I wish to be near to see more of you
But if our time is only now  

I will gaze at you like a sunset
Orchestrating the Nitrogen, Oxygen,
Water, Argon, and Carbon Dioxide
To create stillness in my heart

Knowing there is an end and your beauty
Intensifies as you fade away

I used to sell rocks and scapegoats
to cosmonauts and government officials.
I made my way in geodes and NDAs.

Don't break it!
(The crystal or the non-disclosure)